Your new film, The Skeleton Key, is set in and around New Orleans. What were your impressions of the city?
I did fear that New Orleans would be a bit of a Mardi Gras theme park and the area around Bourbon Street in the French Quarter is very touristy. But there are other really interesting areas steeped in history. St Charles Street has a 1950s street car which runs right down this oak-lined road and when we were there they reopened another street car closed since the 1960s on Canal Street. New Orleans is incredibly multiracial with a young population and, although the state of Louisiana is quite depressed economically, it has a real vibrancy.
Is music an important element of the city?
The Marigny District centred on Frenchman Street is the area for live music now. People cross from bar to bar hearing Brazilian music, blues, funk and jazz. Then there are little bars all around the Uptown area towards the Garden District, which have jukeboxes playing eclectic mixes from the Jam to Aqualung to hip hop. Jazz Fest runs over two consecutive weekends in May and was on while we were filming. It's much more for the locals than Mardi Gras. There is an incredible mix of people such as Steve Winwood, Smokey Robinson, Carlos Santana.
One of my favourite bars was Vaughan's Lounge in the Bywater area. On Thursday nights local trumpet legend Kermit Ruffins plays with his band from about 2am and in between sets he goes outside and fires up the barbecue on the back of his pick-up and just serves the bar's clientele. It was a very mixed crowd - races, ages - all in this little tin blues shack.
How long did you stay in New Orleans?
We shot from March to the end of May, but I was there from the start of the year scouting locations. Kate Hudson stayed in an incredible house in the French Quarter owned by Francis Coppola and I stayed in a house in the Garden District and everyone really got into the lifestyle. We had our fair share of crawfish, jambalaya and gumbo. Although we shot some scenes in the city our main location was a plantation house outside New Orleans. We would travel out every morning across the bayous on these causeway bridges and drive back at 3am often through incredible electric storms lighting up the swamp beneath us.
The film deals with voodoo and hoodoo - how do they fit with modern New Orleans?
Louisiana has French, Hispanic and Caribbean as well as West African and Haitian influences. While voodoo is a religion, hoodoo is a kind of folk magic particular to the South, mixing African, Native American and a smattering of European folk law and witchcraft. It was first documented in the delta blues songs - lines like 'got my mojo working' refer to a charm bag used to ward off evil spirits in hoodoo. New Orleans and the Louisiana landscape are ghostly and the sense of the occult is ingrained in the area. It was a very potent mix for the film.
When you travel, are you always scouting for locations and ideas?
When I like a place I'm always thinking how can I film there. What I enjoy about travel is the specific sense of place: I don't necessarily go just for the shops or the weather. Even with films I've made in Europe, such as The Wings of the Dove which I shot in Venice, I found the idea of getting to know a place and how you change when you're there very interesting.
When I'm filming I always look for places that somehow capture what it is I see and feel about a city.
· The Skeleton Key is on general release
